Sunday, January 15, 2017

Yesterday at 44C in Richmond was a bit on
the hot side! Alan had suggested that I drop round to Price House as
Sonny, a Chinese friend who had sat for us at one of our 'painting
practices' was coming over, and with some photographers as well... we
weren't sure what for!

Sonny is from China, and she imports some
special teas from a certain region of China, where tea cultivation,
preparation and drinking is an artform with similarities to our western
love and appreciation of wines! It turns out that her husband (who is
from England) had recently participated in a tea making competition in
China... against some highly prepared commercial contestants, and
against all odds had won!

So there was a small photographic crew
from a Chinese TV network following Him around doing a documentary of
him and his teamaking in Australia. He prepared a special tea for the
four of us, with tea I think from some of the ancient (1800 year old)
tea plants, which had been stored in a dried mandarin, which we drank
from some of Alan's antique cups and the whole event/ceremony and chat
was recorded by the film crew.

The film team was sweltering in
the heat (it is winter over there) but fortunately the Historic old
house feels like it has air conditioning... even though it doesn't.

I
don't know if any photos will turn up from this unexpected event, but I
do have a photo from the charcoal drawing I did of Sonny when she was
sitting for us

Monday, January 09, 2017

I have been life drawing for over 15 years now, and apart from the
instant rejects after a session, I throw a lot out every now and then
when I look through them.
Even so I have huge piles of drawings... which is one of the reasons I
mainly keep to about an A3 size for most of my regular life drawing
sessions. This last week I decided on a more ruthless cull and was going
to gesso over most of my A2 works and lots of the A3's but discovered
that many of the sketches took on a new lease of life if I just trimmed
them to an A3 size... they seemed to have a new impact!
Anyway after a lot of cropping I saved about 120+ drawings still have a huge pile to recycle for the coming year!

Pile of A2 and A3 drawings to recycle and some of the trimmings from the cropping